Hoopengarner on Outdoors
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Family outing on 4th of July burns bright
Like many of you, I'm getting ready for a family camping vacation over the Fourth of July. Although with all the gear stacked in my garage, you'd think an infantry platoon were shipping out for a six-month tour in the Middle East.
Unlike my Northwest backpacking sojourns of the early '70s, when weight and space were the enemy, today I'm limited only by what I can pack, stack or wedge in the bed of my full-sized pickup.
For car or truck campers today, there's virtually nothing that can't be brought along for comfort in the great outdoors. But even camping out of one's vehicle pales in comparison to those gleaming motorized homes on wheels where nothing - including the kitchen sink - is left behind.
While the national holiday provides the time to make the trip, the family get-together - which will include my mother, father, brother and his wife and two children ages 3 and 5 - also will be an opportunity to commemorate my father turning 80 earlier this year and to commiserate my 50th birthday on July 4.
And it's likely, too, that while we're sitting around the campfire in our deluxe camp chairs with built-in drink holders and foot rests, we'll reminisce about some of our earliest camping trips more than 40 years ago, when times and camping were simpler. Or were they?
As a youngster growing up in Southern California in the late '50s and early '60s, our family's annual two-week camping trip was the high point of an otherwise long, hot summer.
And when my father would arrive home after a particularly long day battling the L.A. freeways and announce the departure date and destination of our trip over dinner, my brother and I would race around the house in joy and begin packing "our" camping gear - a pocketknife, Boy Scout canteen, Zebco fishing rod and a small tackle box of Rooster Tails and snelled bait hooks.
The larger issues - such as food, clothing and the "real" camping gear needed to survive in the wild - were left to my parents, or perhaps more correctly my mother, who would have made a first-class Army quartermaster.
The tedious job of packing everything into our two-door 1959 Chevrolet was left to Dad.
And as my father shoved in the last can of white gas for our Coleman stove and lantern in the once-cavernous trunk of the family car, I learned then one of the laws of camping that hasn't changed much in more than 40 years: For every day spent camping, an equal number - or even a greater number - of days is spent shopping, packing, unpacking and cleaning it all up.
But as the family car creaked out of the driveway before dawn on a hot summer morning, all that was forgotten as we sped east across the Mojave Desert - distant snowcapped peaks beckoning - to such natural wonders of the West as Yosemite and Sequoia national parks in the Sierra Nevada or Yellowstone and Glacier national parks in Montana.
I read recently that the Coleman outdoors company also is celebrating 100 years of outfitting campers, and we certainly had plenty of its equipment packed somewhere in the bowels of our car. Because once we arrived and my mother had picked out the "perfect spot," the job of hauling all the gear out of the car and pitching camp fell upon Dad.
As for my brother and me, our "jobs" were to collect firewood. And "the more the better" Dad would holler after us as we bounded into the woods, armed with only a small hatchet.
However, when we returned several hours later with three or four spindly sticks of wood between us and sopping wet from (accidentally) falling into the river, we would be welcomed to a full-fledged campsite: tent erected, burgers grilling, baked beans bubbling and a red-checkered tablecloth thrown over the immense wooden picnic table and, of course, a snap-crackling fire.
So, as we stare at the dying embers of the family fire, perhaps we'll realize that in nearly half a century the essentials of camping - sleeping bag, lantern, stove, cooler and tent - remain only slightly changed.
What has changed are the people who camp.
Sheldon Coleman said it best in 1951 after taking over as company president.
"Anyone who goes outdoors gets closer to nature and is a better person because they've been there."
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